AP Interview: Leakey calls Lucy skeleton tour 'prostitution', (Heral Tribune)

Ethiopia's dispatching of the Lucy skeleton on a six-year-tour of the United States is akin to prostituting the fragile, 3.2 million year-old fossil, paleontologist Richard Leakey said Friday.
The Lucy skeleton — one of the world's most famous fossils — was quietly flown out of Ethiopia earlier this week for the U.S. tour. Leakey, one of the world's best-known fossil hunters, is not the first to criticize what some see as a gamble with an irreplaceable relic. The U.S. Smithsonian Institution also has objected to the tour, and the secretive manner in which the remains were sent abroad has raised eyebrows in Ethiopia, where the public has seen the real Lucy fossil only twice.

"It's a form of prostitution, it's gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity and it should not be permitted," Leakey told The Associated Press in an interview at his Nairobi office.

Ethiopian officials were not immediately available for comment, but have said in the past that proceeds from the tour would be used to upgrade museums in one of the world's poorest countries. Dirk Van Tuerenhout, the curator of anthropology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where Lucy will be on display from Aug. 31 to April 20, said this week his museum will use "the utmost care."..read more..